Prayer for the Day

by Revd Canon David White

14th September 2025 - Holy Cross Day

Lord Jesus Christ, Master Carpenter of Nazareth
who by your cross, with wood and nails
has wrought our full salvation:
wield well your tools in this your workshop,
that we, who come to you rough-hewn
may be fashioned to a truer beauty by your hand,
for your tender mercies sake. Amen

The original symbol of the Christian faith in the early church was a fish, which when simply drawn and displayed, showed the presence of Christians. The principle and continuing symbol changed to the cross when St Helena, mother of the first Christian Roman emperor Constantine the Great, allegedly ‘discovered’ the true cross on which Jesus was crucified during her pilgrimage to significant sites in the Holy Land in 326. According to Christian legend, this feast commemorates the dedication in 335, of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built where Helena made that discovery of the true cross.

The cross – a method of brutal and inhumane execution in the ancient world – often strikes non-Christians as an unlikely object of veneration. Yet to followers of Jesus, it is ultimately emblematic not of a cruel death but of a life-giving sacrifice that reveals forgiveness, redemption and immortality which is at the heart of our faith. The tree of death becomes the tree of life.

Churches have long set aside a day for honouring the holy cross and for Anglican churches that is 14th September. This prayer takes the emblematic power of the cross a stage further still. For in saying it, we are asking God to accept our ‘rough-hewn’ selves and fashion them into something more like him in beauty and tenderness, thereby accepting our vertical relationship with God in the context of our horizontal relationship with each other.